How news media (de-)legitimize national and international climate politics – A content analysis of newspaper coverage in five countries

Abstract

Implementing global climate change policies on the national and sub-national level requires the support of many societal actors. This support depends on the perceived legitimacy of climate policies, which can be sustained by legitimation debates in domestic news media. This article analyses legitimation statements on climate politics in newspapers of five countries for three Conferences of the Parties in 2004, 2009 and 2014 ( n = 369 legitimation statements). According to our data, it is mainly the legitimacy of international climate policies (instead of national ones) which is evaluated in national fora, and it is usually portrayed negatively. However, there is a noticeable shift in the arguments used over our 10-year period of analysis, moving from efficiency as the dominating evaluation criterion to questions of fairness in the distribution of costs and gains.

Between Guilt and Obligation: Debating the Responsibility for Climate Change and Climate Politics in the Media

“…For this reason, it can be assumed that the success of international negotiations partly depends on the degree to which national media debates articulate converging views of international negotiations-e.g., of the problems at stake, countries' obligations and responsibilities, their goals and national interests, and so on. As most people lack direct experience with international negotiations, they rely heavily on news coverage, which is mainly organized in national media systems (Hallin & Mancini, 2004); thus, national news likely influences how citizens perceive international negotiations and how legitimate they consider national as well as foreign demands and arguments (Michaelowa & Michaelowa, 2012;Kleinen-von Königslöw, Post & Schäfer, 2017). National news coverage thus likely serves as a point of reference for national policymakers.…”

Formal commitments versus actual practices? Narratives as tools of epistemic governance in the debate over Finnish forestry

“…In this case, however, the government was one of the most active participants in the debate, and its arguments were largely identical to those of forest industry representatives. Earlier studies have also pointed out that in the news coverage of international climate politics, the views of national actors tend to receive more attention than those of international organisations (Kleinen-von Königslöw et al, 2019). In our case, it is striking that, beyond the scientific community's open letters and one anonymous EU official, international actors were not among the claim-makers in the analysed media texts.…”

Solidarity in the Public Sphere: A Discourse Network Analysis of German Newspapers (2008–2017)

“…To answer the research question, we conducted a standardized content analysis of 306 claims in 230 articles from four national quality newspapers in Germany published between 2008 and 2017: Die Tageszeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Die Welt. All selected newspapers range among the largest daily newspapers in Germany in terms of circulation and account for a total of 745,522 copies per day (IVW, 2019). All investigated newspapers are influential opinion-forming media outlets and span the journalistic political spectrum: The Die Tageszeitung is a left-leaning newspaper, the Süddeutsche Zeitung is a center-left newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung is a center-right newspaper, and the Die Welt is a conservative newspaper (Eilders, 2002).…”